Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam – The beggars are mostly gone. So are the streetwalkers. Shops by Bulgari and Cartier are at the newly elegant Caravelle Hotel in the center of town. A Hyatt is opening soon only a few yards away.
To the eyes of visitors here, including international journalists gathered for a reunion, the market economy and capitalism seem to be doing just fine in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. But on Saturday, the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the mood in the pulsingly hot city was revolutionary – to a degree.
Red flags with yellow stars were everywhere. The face of Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam’s revolutionary leader, was on billboards across the city. Near the Presidential Palace – where North Vietnamese tanks smashed down the gates April 30, 1975, leading President Duong Van Minh to surrender unconditionally – government workers and soldiers marched in a parade. The country’s leaders, including the legendary war hero Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, who also defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu, turned out to watch.
But there were no tanks or missiles in the parade. Instead, a 4-ton cake was rolled out for the more than 1,000 people who were born on the country’s “Liberation Day” and were celebrating their 30th birthday.
In fact, the parade seemed pointedly designed to depict a benign nation seeking friendship, notably with the United States, Hanoi’s biggest trading partner. Some floats carried the logos of American credit- card companies. Near the parade route, the Diamond department store, as upscale as any in the U.S., was open for business. And tight security left most people watching the parade on television, if at all.
As if to underline Vietnam’s openness, Prime Minister Phan Van Khai sent out a message Friday reaching out to the nation’s former enemies and those who fought on the side of the former South Vietnam, urging all sides to “close the past, look to the future.”
The anniversary of Saigon’s fall, which ended a war that left 58,000 Americans dead and claimed as many as 3 million Vietnamese lives, also was the occasion for a return to the city of dozens of American, British and Australian journalists who covered the war from the mid-1960s until 1975. Many of the journalists had not seen each other since they were in their 20s.